Amazon Kindle plagued by self-publishing spam

Aspiring authors losing out to rights-free content

Junk email? That's so yesterday; it's all about the e-book publishing spam these days, with the Amazon Kindle self-publishing platform proving to be a spammers' paradise.

The work of legitimate aspiring authors is getting swamped by Private Label Rights (PLR) work – prose that is available to be picked up cheaply (or freely) by anyone online.

Spammers and those looking to make a quick buck are reformatting these rights-free works into ebooks and sticking them up for sale around 99 cents (60p) using the Kindle Direct Publishing platform - and some are even selling books and DVDs to educate others in how to do it.

The man who would be Kindle

Not only is it irritating if you accidentally buy one of these PLR works, but this influx of spammy ebooks makes it harder than ever to find something worth reading.

Another sneaky money-spinning trick infiltrating the book platform is the copying and republishing of ebooks that are already proving popular, using a different title and cover.

One element making the platform so attractive to spammers is that distributing a work using the Kindle Direct Publishing service doesn't cost anything; Amazon simply takes a cut if you make any sales.

With plagiarism and spam-like content taking over, questions will no doubt be raised over whether Amazon needs to police the self-publishing platform more aggressively, or remove it altogether.